News

Despite the extreme importance of transaction processing for ensuring reliability and manageability of distributed computing and several existing WS-* standards, the implementation of the transactional behavior in SOA is still pretty rare. The Reservation pattern, described in a new post by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz, provides one of the possible solutions to this problem.

Microsoft has released a new version of .NET 4.0 Beta 1, one that incorporates STM.NET, the Software Transactional Memory. STM is an alternative mechanism to lock-based synchronization used to control the concurrent access to shared memory.

The topic of distributed transactions and their place within a REST world has come up again recently. Many people have indicated that they are either thinking of using the combination or are doing so now. Others, including Roy Fielding, believe that the two simply do not go together.

.NET 4 will have new types to support building cancellation-aware applications and libraries. The new CancellationToken, CancellationTokenSource, and cancellation exception types provide a cooperative cancellation framework.

Betfair is the world's largest betting exchange with a transaction volume the equivalent of over half the combined equity trading volume of every major stock exchange in the world. In response to an increase in transaction volume coupled with a decrease in value per transaction, Betfair launched a number of initiatives to dramatically increase transaction processing capacity and reduce cost.

It is a common mistake to confuse transaction models with transaction strategies. Mark Richards discusses the three transaction models supported by the Java Platform (Local Transaction, Programmatic Transaction, and Declarative Transaction) and four transaction strategies (Client Orchestration, API Layer, High Concurrency, and High Speed Processing) that can be based on those models.

Nigel Ellis, Architect at Microsoft, presented today a detailed overview of the new relational model of Azure SQL Data Service, which was announced a couple of weeks ago on the team's blog. Nigel also demonstrated how SDS could be used by WordPress (a PHP application) via an ODBC driver.

Eric Newcomer, chair of the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group and former CTO of IONA Technologies, posted an answer to the question “What is the difference between RESTful transactions and Web Services transactions?”

In this interview, recorded at QCon London, Google architect Gregor Hohpe talks to Stefan Tilkov about his new work on conversation patterns, building upon his earlier work on enterprise integration patterns. Gregor also talks about the similarities and differences in several approaches to cloud computing.

Eric Evans, the author of Domain Driven Design and playing the role of an interviewer for the first time, asks Greg Young about the architectural challenges encountered while designing and implementing a system used to process tens of thousands of transactions per second.

In this interview, recorded at QCon London 2008, Red Hat Director of Standards and Technical Development Manager for the SOA platform Mark Little talks about extended transaction models, the history of transaction standardization, their role for web services and loosely coupled systems, and the possibility of an end to the Web services vs. REST debate.

At RailsConf on Friday, Avi Bryant and Bob Walker of GemStone revealed plans for the MagLev project. MagLev will run Ruby on Rails within GemStone's distributed object technology. The MagLev VM, although only partially implemented, so far outperforms MRI 1.8.

In this presentation from QCon London 2007, William Soo and Meeraj Kunnumpurath discuss the Voca transaction processing system architecture, the previous Mainframe-based architecture, architectural challenges and requirements, the new Spring and J2EE-based architecture, upcoming challenges for Voca, and technologies to watch for in the future.

Erlang has recently generated a lot of interest as a language that can deal both efficiently and elegantly with concurrency. In particular, there is no shared memory between "process" instances which only communicate via asynchronous messages. Nevertheless, Shared Memory Concurrency remains an intense research subject especially for multicore applications.